Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Alice was technically a Cam Girl and technically a Gamer. In reality, that meant grinding assorted games for a pitiful income per game per hour, and taking selfies at least four times a day. In the eyes of a certain generation, she was lazy and vain.
The fact was, she was doing everything she could to raise enough to (a) keep alive, and (b) pay off the debt she owed for a degree she’d got for a job that had been shipped off to a different country. She ran a Patreon. She had an Etsy shop. She had a Ko-fi account. She spent every hour of every day scraping for pennies and doing whatever she could to get someone to pass her a couple of dollars.
She barely made it to the poverty line, lived on food stamps, and kept looking for what everyone else called “a real job”. She had more friends online than she had friends in the neighbourhood. Especially considering that the entire population were practically vagrants and, much like Alice, scraping to make rent and eat at the same time.
[Image: tweet by Titanium Cranium (@FelicityTC) including three screenshots of a Harry potter book in three different formats on Amazon. Text:
“Harry Potter on Amazon -
Print: $6.39
Audio: $44.99
Braille: $100.00
#CripTax”]
So, let me explain this a bit.
The defenders of CripTax prices will say that those prices cover the cost of production. This is, without a doubt, true. I work at a university where we often have to take written materials and convert them into braille – it takes a LOT of people hours, special software, and a braille embosser.
But those defenders of higher prices are reversing the argument to justify fleecing disabled readers.
What do I mean by that?
Braille is not magic. It is done by taking plain text and feeding it through fairly affordable translation software, creating a document that can easily be printed in braille.
All that time and effort and special software? IS NOT FOR THE BRAILLE.
It is to take the document provided by the publisher (usually in PDF format, the same file they send to the printers) and turn it into plain, unadorned text, by hand. Text has to be “stripped” (OCR/text recognition); images have to be described; footnotes have to be embedded; special pullouts and other formatting shifted or removed.
Printing in braille is cheap; reverse engineering a finished text to print it in braille IS NOT.
Same with those audio books. After a book is completed and, often, after it has already been published, the publisher arranges to have the book recorded by a professional voice actor/reader, which usually also involves a recording producer, if not a recording studio, which all stacks up to $$, no two ways about it.
However: that cost? IS RARELY FACTORED INTO THE BUDGET OF PRINTING A BOOK.
Oh, it might be, if the author is JK Rowling and it is well known that readers will want audio versions right away. But most of the time, nope, the audio book is produced only after the hard copy book has become a decent seller, and so it’s an extra cost which is claimed must be covered by making the audio version extra expensive to buy. (Even then it’s somewhat ridiculous, since honestly, creating an audio book is, in the end, cheaper than printing, factoring in the cost of paper.)
If publishers factored audio book production into the assumed costs of publishing a book, they would have very little reason to price it higher.
If publishers factored in creating a “plain text” file – including having editors/authors describe images – that could be used to print braille copies or to be used with refreshable braille readers (electronic pinboards, basically), then there would be zero reason to price those books higher.
tl;dr: Yes, it’s a #criptax, and the excuse that “those formats are more expensive to produce so they have to be priced higher” is only true if you completely throw out the premise that publishers have an obligation to account for disabled readers when they are actually budgeting for and publishing the book.
I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is exactly the sort of argument thatpeople try to use to justify inaccessibility in all kinds of areas. When we tell a company that their website or appliance or piece of technology isn’t accessible, they frequently tell us that they are sorry to hear that but that the accessibility is too expensive and time-consuming to add in now. There is also a provision in the law that allows companies to not bother including accessibility in their products if the cost of building in the accessibility is more than 5% of the total cost to build the whole product in the US.
That seems reasonable on the surface, doesn’t it? Except here’s the thing—the accessibility should have been a part of the original plans to begin with and designed in from the very beginning and should have been considered a necessary element and just another ordinary part of the cost of producing the product, not some extra feature that can be opted out of if it’s too expensive. The problem is that these companies do not understand the fact that if you cannot afford to build the product with the accessibility included, then you cannot afford to build the product and that is that. It’s exactly the same as not being able to afford to make the product with all elements up to safety and health codes and standards. If you can’t afford to meet the legal standards, then you can’t afford to make the product, and it’s that simple. Accessibility is not an exception to this and it should not be considered as such. It should be just as much an ordinary required part of the design process as any other element, not an extra, shiny, fancy feature that you can just choose not to bother with if it costs a little bit of money.
Accessibility should be part of the standard design process just as much as safety codes and health standards and other legal regulations. The ADA has existed for 20 years so companies have had ample time to catch up and learn to plan for accessibility from the beginning as a part of the standard required design process. If you can’t afford to create the product fully up to code, standards, and accessibility laws, then you simply can’t afford to make the product. No excuses, no exceptions.
Thanks for this awesomely informative post; this is precisely what I used to do for a living, in a college environment. People were often surprised that this work was not somehow already done by the publishing companies, but nope. My department did it all by hand, more or less. From scanning, to creating PDFs, to OCR text extraction, to formatting the files for JAWS, to making the corrections and image descriptions.
The thing is, college textbooks are so image heavy, compartmentalized, and splashed with text boxes on every page, with increasingly convoluted diagrams that sometimes take up multiple pages, I was basically *writing* half the textbook myself. Basically, you have to take an image like this diagram (which might be in a book, or part of a handout, or be embedded in an inaccessible online module, or part of a video lecture, or maybe it’s part of a powerpoint or slideshow):
and figure out how to describe every bit of pertinent information that is happening visually, decide in what order to present that information, and do it in a way that doesn’t make the student just decide to give up because holy crap, right??
And this part is *just* the textbook. I did this for all class materials-in all topics, in all formats, for every teacher, in every discipline. everything from astronomy, world history, american history, economics, biology, literature, art history, history of modern philosophy, poetry, and even a few things for extracurricular and clubs.
And you know what? A lot of the time professors would seem to think they’re doing everyone some kind of favor by giving us the books and materials like, the DAY before class starts. Or, y’know, sometimes like a week AFTER.
There’s a reason I decided to become staff in Disability Services rather than a professor as I’d originally intended-I was a disabled student too, and I wanted to do my best to prevent others from having to fight like I had to fight. I started out with like 5 people working under me to get the stuff scanned and processed and I was doing the final corrections, formatting, and image/diagram descriptions; by the time it was nearing its end it was just me literally flopping books on a scanner with one hand and typing with my fingers and wrist with the other.
They eliminated my department like 2 years ago, and I got laid off. **there’s** your “commitment” to accessibility in higher education.
That’s how the sausage gets made, my friends….and in this case, how it doesn’t.
Indie author weighing in:
I’ve looked into doing audiobooks for my novels and… the one company NOT affiliated with Amazon and its predatory copyright-stealing antics costs the author $240US per hour.
In advance.
I’m betting “forget braille” is my only option in regards to making my writing accessible to the blind.
This _should_ be a free service for publication of any variety, but…
Braille is expensive
So are actors to read things
Studio time is valuable, darling
There’s currently no such thing as an easy way to print braille books
And unless there’s a blindness epidemic sweeping the globe, accessibility is not going to be a priority because other people have made it ludicrously expensive. I mean, I want to have my stuff out there for everyone? But I can’t afford to do it.
I was just on the phone to MeMum, yesterday, about the minimum wage in the States. She was stunned that folks are forced to get by on $7.50 an hour.
She was even more stunned when I told her that that’s what some folks are fighting to get.
It’s pretty bad when you have to explain to a grandmother that the richest country on Earth, filled with the most gazillionaires, “can’t afford” to pay the people who work the hardest enough money to live on.
Seriously. If the richest people in the US took a 10% pay cut, they wouldn’t even notice the difference.
I swear, if it gets any worse, UNICEF will step in and try to get rich Americans to sponsor starving children in America.
Put basically: If they’re offering it to plebes like you, the bubble is about to burst.
There are numerous economic bubbles in past and present. The stock bubble. The internet bubble. The housing bubble. The quantum chocolate bubble. Okay, I just wish there was a quantum chocolate bubble…
The point is, bubbles are just like pyramid schemes. Sooner or later, they’re going to run out of people to sell it to and the whole shebang is going to fall on top of whoever’s stuck on the bottom.
That usually means the “sucker” portion of the common throng. The people who believe they’re going to get rich by investing everything they own on a shanty-house in BF-nowhere that the bank says is worth tons and that said people can’t possibly repay inside of ten lifetimes.
The people who genuinely believe that sending a letter to five friends will result in a vast fortune arriving to them by mail.
The people who really think that some wealthy person in Nigeria [or wherever] is going to launder their millions through a plebe’s bank account.
And the people who think pyramid schemes really, really work.
Let me run through some math. Person A decides to start a little scheme selling otherwise worthless pieces of paper as part of a pyramid scheme. He sells to ten people and gives instructions to each to sell to ten more. They remove their names once they’re at the top of a list of ten people.
On the first iteration [the first sale] there are 11 people in the loop.
Second iteration, 111 have bought in
Third, 1111.
Fourth, 11111. Fifth 111111. By the sixth iteration, you’ve reached over a million people. By the ninth, one billion.
There are about sixty billion people on this earth, the last time I checked. At that rate, you’re going to run out of suckers. And the last people to buy in are always the first to cop the consequences of falling for it.
Same principle with [Mad-Lib here] bubbles. The richest people get hold of said maguffin first, and sell it at inflated prices to those lower in the economic scale as an investment opportunity. Increased demand equals increased value, and a few of the lower echelon sell it down, again at an increased price, to those slightly beneath them.
Lather, rinse and repeat for a few iterations and Joe Schlubb and his neighbours are all desperately trying to sign you on to Maguffin Inc.
Only the skeptics can survive bubbles with their fundings intact. Them, or the people who started it in the first place.
If you’re at a sales pitch and they mention the wealthy’s secrets to getting rich, leave. That’s a sure sign you’re about to be bubbled.
